I'm not, but I have seen them locally and they look like such a blast to drive! I would like to see what it would take to build one, or maybe I could look to buy a used one. We have a track not far from me (1/2 mile banked oval) that used to run them every weekend.

You are in the heartland. I'm sure there are oval and road courses there. I prefer road courses (sprints) more than oval. Buy a used you can get some pretty good deals. Here's a pic of my latest. http://pic.twitter.com/Lkkg6UWU

You guys have the little sealed ovals as well as the big ones. We had one mid-sized oval for NASCAR but it's been disused for a decade (the landfill sunk and it's as bumpy as heck). We have small dirt ovals for sprint cars, and that is pretty much it for grassroots motorsport.

So besides that it's all road circuits here, and the cheapest way to get onto them is to race superkarts. I chose the non-gearbox category because it was cheap and easy. Those 250 monsters need a full time mechanic. Jason, we had the 80cc gbox class too, it's all but died out now. Can you re-post your pic? I can't get on to Twitter.

I was sponsored by my employer, and we raced all over the eastern states, mainly at Phillip Island, which is one of our few world-class tracks. It was an absolute blast, but sadly I had to throw it in early in 2009 when the daughter got into horses (which is even more expensive than motorsport! I cringe....)

Yes, I am in Wisconsin, not far at all from Road America. I think that type of track would be just a hoot in a shifter. They run super bikes and vintage racers, lots of Porches, some Ferraris, and Lambos... And now that I look through their website I see they run carts!!!

They have 35 open days a year where you can pay $20 a day to run your cart on the track. Or I should say the tracks, because they have a lot of different tracks. Here's a pdf I saw in the site kind of explaining what they have and do:

I had a cracker of a race at The Island when it started hailing. One of the hailstones cracked my helmet visor. They red-flagged and nullified that one, which was annoying, because I was running second.

As any race driver will say, in wet weather it's not the lack of grip which is the problem, it's the fact that you can't see.

The Road America thing looks like karts running on their kart track. We call this "sprint karting', i.e. short-circuits just for karts. I did that in the 1990's.
Superkarts is the name we give to a kart which runs on the same tracks as the cars, whether it has a gearbox or not. Just to confuse things, some sprint karts run gears- on kart tracks! They must have two sets of hands.

Here's some onboard of exactly what I raced, in fact my teammate (I'm pictured in the opening shots ) at a track called Oran Park, just outside Sydney. Sadly, the track is no more- it's a housing estate. It was a thriller ride for our little toys. You can see the difficulty of having no gears to play with, but still the cornering speed is ridiculous. Our lap times were similar to a Porsche GT3.

I think the carts at Road America run on the bigger tracks too... Here's a vid I found on you tube showing shifters going on looonnngg straights and sweeping turns.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThuJ9D4qu8U

That's more like it JD! As much as I love the 250 beasts, in the "slower" classes of karts, the racing is better. 5 wide around corners and massive drafting games.

Sprint kart guys would laugh at us because they reckon we just sat there, screaming down long straights for hours before reaching a corner. Then some of them tried road racing... and they were hooked. Even on a wide track, when you reach corners at those speeds, things get very narrow.

I gotta say, Americans are stereotyped worldwide as NASCAR Oval junkies, yet you have the best road race tracks in the world- real old school stuff. RA, Road Atlanta, Laguna, VIR, Infineon, these are awesome tracks. Plus you race anything, anywhere. Here, we are nannied by a bunch of hi-viz wearing insurance beauracrats. Dan Wheldon's death reminds us that safety is important, but not at the expense of genuine challenge.

That said, the jet-kart, well, that's kinda insane...

The problem with socialism is that you soon run out of other people's money.
- Margaret Thatcher